19 Taxation
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ItemTax knowledge diffusion via strategic alliances( 2019-09-01)This study examines strategic alliances as channels for tax knowledge diffusion between firms. Despite solid insights on within-firm determinants of tax planning, little is known about tax knowledge diffusion via cross-firm connections. Since theory suggests that the role of strategic alliances in tax knowledge diffusion is ambiguous, we test our notion empirically. To tease out potential tax knowledge diffusion, we analyze changes in the tax planning behavior of high-tax firms in strategic alliances with low-tax firms in comparison to high-tax firms in strategic alliances with other high-tax firms. We apply a multivariate regression model, a difference-in-differences approach and use basic textual analysis to identify the main business purpose of a strategic alliance. We find a substantial increase in the tax planning behavior of high-tax firms in strategic alliances with low-tax firms relative to high-tax firms in high-tax strategic alliances. Additionally, our results suggests that high-tax firms are able to adjust their tax planning behavior within two years of network initiation when cooperating with low-tax firms. Because we are also able to provide a series of robustness checks, we interpret the identified responses to be consistent with existing tax knowledge diffusion via strategic alliances.
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ItemDo Constituency Statutes Deter Tax Avoidance?( 2019-08-31)The constituency statutes, passed mainly in the U.S. in the last century, allow firm directors to consider the interests of stakeholders other than shareholders (i.e., non-financial stakeholders) when making business decisions. One type of critical decisions managers make pertains to corporate tax planning, which creates value for the shareholders at the expense of the public interest or social welfare. In this paper, we investigate whether this law change with a permissive nature affects directors, and hence, managers' attitude towards corporate tax avoidance. Employing a staggered difference-in-difference method, we find that firms incorporated in the states that have adopted constituency statutes exhibit significantly higher ETRs based on current tax expense, but not total tax expense or cash tax paid. This causal relationship suggests that managers, with the permission to consider the social impact of tax avoidance, become less aggressive in tax planning. We further find that the effect of adoption is stronger for financially unconstrained firms and firms in retail businesses, where the demand (cost) for tax avoidance is lower (higher). Finally, we show that our main results are driven by firms located in states with a high sense of social responsibility and the firms with high levels of tax avoidance prior to the adoption. Overall, the findings in this paper suggest a positive social impact brought by the passage of constituency legislations.
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ItemFinancial Security Issuance and Cash Savings through Tax Planning( 2019-08-31)In this paper, we investigate how firms’ issuance of equity and debt securities are associated with cash savings through tax planning. According to the pecking order theory of Myers and Majluf (1984), due to higher cost of capital attributed to information asymmetry, firms use the least costly financial resources, such as cash on hand followed by debt issuance and equity issuance to carry out investments. However, the literature on pecking order theory has not considered cash savings through risky tax planning. Since issuance of shares is the most costly and the last resort for raising capital, and issuance of debt is less costly and signals firms’ profitability, we predict that firms that issue shares will save more cash via aggressive tax planning than firms that issue debt, which are not expected to engage in as much aggressive tax planning. Using a sample of U.S. publicly listed firms for the period 1987-2016, we find that an increase in share issuance is associated with a decrease in cash effective tax rate (CASH-ETR), indicating that firms that issue shares save cash by tax planning. We do not find any evidence that debt issuance reduces CASH-ETR or induce tax avoidance behavior. Our findings are robust when we use first difference estimation method, propensity score matching, and gross equity and debt issuances as explanatory variables, instead of net equity and debt issuances. This study provides insights into the interplay between the taxing authority and shareholders, especially when firms raise external capital.
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ItemLobbying with the Competition: Do Firm Differentiation, Law Specificity, and Firm Strategy Matter?( 2019-08-31)In this paper, we examine how firms choose their lobbying participation given the competitive advantages that can be gained from: (1) firm-specific attributes in the form of differentiation, (2) specificity of tax laws under which firms operate, (3) and other tax strategy policies that firms have at their disposal to gain a competitive advantage. We use tax lobbying surrounding the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as our empirical setting. We find that firm differentiation increases individual lobbying and decreases trade association lobbying when the laws being lobbied are narrow in scope. However, broader laws significantly reduce the relation between firm differentiation and individual lobbying. We also find that tax planning and tax lobbying is coordinated, and it is not impacted by law specificity. The findings from our study provide important insights into the circumstances under which firms will choose to lobby for laws and in what format firms will conduct their lobbying.
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ItemEarly Evidence on the use of Foreign Cash following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017( 2019-08-31)The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) imposes a mandatory repatriation tax on multinational firms’ unremitted foreign earnings, reducing internal capital market frictions through a deemed repatriation of unremitted foreign earnings and eliminating future repatriation tax costs. This change to the U.S. corporate tax system gives multinational firms access to lower cost internal capital (i.e., foreign cash). This study provides evidence that multinational firms with greater levels of pre-TCJA foreign cash increased their post-TCJA repurchases but did not change their shareholder dividends or capital expenditures. We further document that the increase in repurchases is driven by those firms that had greater pre-TCJA repatriation tax costs and firms in weaker financial health. This outcome is consistent with internal capital market theory and suggests a decrease in internal capital market frictions allows companies access to trapped foreign cash. However, our results suggest firms used the repatriated foreign cash on shareholder payouts rather than capital investment. This conflicts with a stated goal of the TCJA to spur domestic economic growth directly and highlights an unintended consequence of the TCJA.